A former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, Eamonn Fingleton spent 27 years monitoring East Asian economics from a base in Tokyo. In September 1987 he issued the first of several predictions of the Tokyo banking crash and went on in "Blindside," a controversial 1995 analysis that was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith and Bill Clinton, to show that a heedless America was fast losing its formerly vaunted leadership in advanced manufacturing -- and particularly in so-called producers' goods -- to Japan.
His 1999 book "In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity" anticipated the American Internet stock crash of 2000 and offered an early warning about the abuse of new financial instruments.
In his 2008 book "In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony," he challenged the conventional view that China is converging to Western economic and political values.
His books have been translated into French, Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. They have been read into the U.S. Senate record and named among the ten best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com.

A Mystery Man Leads China's Push Into Africa

Those of us who hark back nostalgically to the glory days of Anglophone financial journalism in the 1960s and 1970s know that little of that tradition survives. For the most part the great newspapers of those days have fallen prey to bureaucracy and cost-cutting. Worse, their editors seem to care more about pandering to the gods of globalism than informing their readers. Hence, far too often, a pattern of hesitancy and misplaced political correctness in covering China.

Occasionally, however, in all the journalistic dross, a true diamond gleams through.

For anyone who wants to read a timeless piece of quality financial journalism, I recommend “The Middle Man,” an article by Tom Burgis in today’s Weekend Magazine of the Financial Times. The eponymous middle man is Sam Pa, a Chinese-born, Hong Kong-based entrepreneur whose rise without trace is a classic enigma of modern China.

As recounted by Burgis (writing with Demetri Sevastopulo and Cynthia O’Murchu), for more than a decade now Pa has been Beijing’s most important surrogate in building Chinese power in Africa. In that regard he seems like a younger version of Li Ka-shing whose globe-girdling assets include most of the infrastructure in and around the Panama Canal. (If you didn’t know that a Beijing surrogate controlled the Panama Canal, don’t be too hard on yourself — it says more about the quality of modern Anglophone financial journalism than the depth of your reading.)

China’s agenda in Africa has, of course, become increasingly clear in recent years. On the one hand it seeks oil and other natural resources. On the other, it has been building all sorts of infrastructure to facilitate its access to such resources. Either way, as Burgis shows, Pa seems to be ubiquitous in smoothing China’s path. It probably does not hurt that China’s business dealings in Africa are little constrained by the well-intentioned but utopian U.S Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.

Not the least mysterious aspect of Pa’s modus operandi is that, as calculated by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, he has at least eight aliases. He even sometimes uses his girlfriend/wife (the legal status of their relationship is unclear) as a front. What seems beyond doubt is that as China has boosted its trade with Africa nearly tenfold in the last decade, Pa has played an outsize role. As Burgis points out, a particularly telling indicator of China’s rise is that the main Chinese bank for overseas finance has been lending more to Africa than the World Bank in recent years.

Perhaps the most surprising fact Burgis uncovers concerns not Africa but Wall Street. Apparently one of Pa’s companies owns 23 Wall Street, a building otherwise known as The Corner. Built just over a century ago and formerly the headquarters of J. P. Morgan, it is an ostentatiously low-rise building in among skyscrapers and was once one of the ultimate symbols of American capitalism.

Why would Pa want to own such an iconic, if not particularly practical, building? Beats me, but it all adds to his mystique — and it reminds us that, as the Chinese say, we have been fated to live in interesting times. We are witnesses to probably the fastest shift in economic power in history — a shift that our media have generally misunderstood and underplayed.

Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

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If only we bordered Germany, I could at least travel there easily and SEE for free how a smart country is run. Living in the dumbest country on the face of the earth, though, I can’t even go to Canada without a passport. So, we get all the cheap imports from Mexico, without free movement. I liked it better before we were all one, big, global family.

I agree with much of what you say (and indeed your analysis is very similar in many respects to that in my books). But I doubt if Scandinavian democracy and East Asian-style economic growth are compatible.

The East Asian system is built on a “soft authoritarian” system as you note where information is key and withheld. Selective enforcement of laws are used, as you’ve noted. It’s greatest advantages are its long-term orientation and the fact that its leaders are objective, as in, they don’t let ideology color their worldview.

The Scandinavian model is perhaps the closest thing there has ever been to a “true” democracy. It is built to be the opposite, with a focus on disclosure, letting democracy take place and has low corruption. Although not as long-term oriented as East Asia, it is much more so than the Anglo-model.

The real conflict here is that voters may choose the short-term over the long-term (namely opposition to suppression of consumption). On the other hand, looking at say, Germany and Denmark, they seem to have accepted it when it comes to renewable energy (Denmark for example is a leader in wind, while Germany has been a leader in solar) to an extent. Denmark pays quite high energy bills. It all comes down to how informed and how long-term thinking your voters are. Sadly, that does not bode well in the Anglo world at the moment.

Another is whether a democratic government could manage the economy as skillfully as the East Asians have. There would have to be something similar to Japan’s Ministry of Finance in control I think.

Perhaps you are right. The last time consumption was suppressed the way it is daily in the East Asian world would be WWII.

Coming out of the war, the US, Australian, NZ, and Canadian economies were prosperous. In the case of the UK, after the immediate postwar austerity, living conditions were better than they ever were. For both the UK and Ireland, the 1960s were prosperous until manufacturing began its decline.

The question is, what would it take to get the average person to see the long-term benefits of a policy to suppress consumption?

But even then, I suspect that if the Anglo-World adopted the Scandinavian model, it would be “good enough” to hold its own against East Asia, especially if it could be combined with a more long-term orientation. The problem is getting the entrenched ideology out.